Integrated Delivery System

Success Stories

Despite being common, healthcare-associated infections are potentially deadly and carry a significant financial cost. Of healthcare associated infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) are one of the most common, despite most instances of CAUTI being preventable.
As CAUTI was determined to be one of the top five influential factors in the publicly report quality scores, Piedmont Healthcare looked to data for more visibility into factors that were contributing to CAUTI rate in an effort to permanently reduce the number of infections. By engaging staff for compliance with CAUTI prevention best practices, Piedmont has seen sustainable improvements.
Results:

Healthcare organizations need to be cognizant of their readiness for change, enabling them to create a plan that will enhance the organization’s ability to successfully drive change. While many studies have been completed on the importance of organizational readiness in non-healthcare organizations, there is little research and relatively few, measurement tools focused specifically on healthcare organizations.
To cement the Pulse Heart Institute (Pulse Heart) as a destination for adult heart health, and ensure its long-term success, Pulse Heart required a better understanding of its readiness to drive and sustain outcomes improvements—which it found through an onsite assessment that leveraged the Health Catalyst® Outcomes Improvement Readiness Assessment (OIRA) framework. Using the assessment findings and subsequent recommendations, Pulse Heart successfully developed, and continues to develop, the findings to guide workplans to improve competencies and enable the organization for long-term outcomes improvements success.
Based on the results of the onsite readiness assessment they have identified and implemented interventions to improve readiness for change in each of the five major OIRA Tool categories:

Nationally, readmission within 90 days after colorectal surgery occurs in about one in four patients, at a cost of approximately $9,000 per readmission. Committed to improving its clinical and financial outcomes, MultiCare, an integrated healthcare delivery system in the Pacific Northwest, decided to focus an improvement effort on elective colorectal surgery when it recognized that patient population had a high opportunity for improvement in both clinical outcomes and cost.
Effectively using its existing quality improvement methodology and Collaborative structure, MultiCare leveraged the work of the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) Society and identified and implemented standardized best practice care routines and interventions that would benefit this population. By using the information in the Enterprise Data Warehouse and analytics applications to monitor clinical outcomes and compliance, and leveraging technology in the EHR to provide decision support and order sets at the point of care, MultiCare was able to significantly improve the clinical outcomes for these patients.
Results:

Allina Health needed to ensure the data it reported to regulatory agencies was timely and accurate. The integrated health system sees 100,000 inpatient hospital admissions annually, 340,000 emergency care visits, and 6,000 physicians and 1,600 nurses providing and documenting care. Due to the sheer volume of patients and employees, clinical data abstraction at Allina Health is not a small undertaking.
Looking to stay compliant while reducing resource utilization, Allina Health sought to change its workflow procedures for faster, more accurate clinical data abstraction. A large amount of clinical data required for compliance with CMS performance measures and Joint Commission Core Measure resides in unstructured data, such as narrative notes, which require manual data abstraction. With the help of data analytics, Allina Health was able to develop evidence-based standardized processes for clinical reporting and automate some clinical data abstraction.
Results:

76 percent relative improvement in time to data availability at each site. Data is typically available within 14 days of discharge, far exceeding the 30-day target.
95.5 percent accuracy for CMS validation.

At MultiCare Health System, the processes for denial management were not as effective as they could be, negatively impacting net patient revenue and financial performance through millions of dollars in adjustments. While only two-thirds of denials are recoverable, nearly 90 percent are preventable. MultiCare looked at improving denial management as an opportunity to improve appropriate revenue capture for services provided. Through targeted improvement efforts that included standardized workflows and increased data visibility, the health system is improving the root cause of denials.
Results:

Healthcare reimbursement continues to shift away from fee-for-service reimbursement models to value-based, risk-sharing agreements. This shift has resulted in organizations revising compensation strategies to engage physicians in value-based compensation arrangements. An effective value-based physician compensation plan is critically important, particularly in competitive environments where organizations must optimize the ability to recruit and retain highly skilled providers. One commonly used physician compensation approach includes a base salary and productivity incentives, coupled with additional compensation opportunities for achieving quality and service goals. The physician compensation package at John Muir Health is not only competitive, it is also complex, but the support process was burdensome, inefficient, and lacked transparency.
John Muir Health developed a plan to leverage the Health Catalyst® Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, to develop an automated process for physician compensation. The plan created efficiencies in time and effort across multiple domains and produced software to automate future work. The benefits included:

Saving 1,560 hours of time required to produce the data necessary to calculate physician compensation.
Successfully integrating more than ten different compensation models and 20 different data elements for more than 300 different providers into the physician compensation analytic application, automating the process.

Influenza, a contagious respiratory illness spread by droplets, can lead to hospitalization and even death. Millions of people get influenza each year, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and thousands to tens of thousands die from influenza related causes each year. The key to preventing a devastating outbreak is vaccinating enough people that an outbreak is unlikely.
When Allina Health identified that its own rates for influenza vaccination were lower than desired, the health system studied data gleaned from its EHR and an Analytics Platform from Health Catalyst, which includes a Late-Binding™ Enterprise Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, to understand its true current vaccination performance. The data revealed that changes were in order, which Allina put in place through clinician feedback, engagement, and education.
Results:

4.8 percentage point improvement in influenza vaccination rate, exceeding the Healthy People 2020 goals for vaccination.

Each day, 91 Americans die from an opioid overdose. Historically, illegal opioids, such as heroin, were the primary contributing factor to overdoses. Today, it is well understood that a driving force for opioid abuse is prescriptions, which contribute significantly to the overdose epidemic.
Following a series of adverse outcomes related to opioid misuse within the community, Allina Health sought to evaluate how it managed acute non-cancer pain in the outpatient setting, particularly among opioid-naïve patients. By leveraging the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, Allina Health obtained data on prescribing patterns and identified several opportunities to reduce the number of opioids prescribed.
Results:

Increasingly, high-functioning healthcare organizations are recognizing the challenge of sustaining results following successful clinical improvement initiatives. Sepsis is a major driver of mortality in the U.S. In fact, it is estimated that up to half of all hospital deaths are linked to sepsis. After executing a successful strategy to improve outcomes for patients with sepsis, Piedmont Healthcare was determined to sustain those critical reductions in mortality, length of stay, and cost.
The health system “hardwired” process changes into the EHR, monitored performance compliance via a well-developed analytics application, and fostered strong leadership on the frontlines to champion a culture of continuous improvement. In the second year of its latest sepsis improvement effort, Piedmont was able to not only sustain, but also to further improve upon its first-year improvement results.
Second-year results:

14.2 percent reduction in mortality for severe sepsis and septic shock translating to 68 lives saved in one year.
30.7 percent improvement in number of patients receiving calculated fluid target.
$1.2 million saved in one year from decreased variable cost.

Nationally, hospitalization for persons with mental health disorders has increased faster than hospitalization for any other condition. Of concern is the lack of bed space to intake these patients on a timely basis. In Minnesota, for example, more than 50 percent of available state psychiatric beds were closed between 2005 and 2010. Furthermore, readmission rates for patients with mood disorders is higher than any other mental health condition, with 15 percent readmitted within 30 days of hospital discharge and up to 22.4 percent of patients with schizophrenia being readmitted. While the average cost of a readmission in the U.S. is approximately $7,200, of greater concern is hospital readmission represents poor patient outcomes related to lack of adequate access to community mental health resources and challenges with adherence to care plans needed to prevent chronic relapse.
In response to these challenges, Allina Health put a new care transition process in place, redesigned workflow, and added key patient support roles. To measure the effectiveness of new interventions, Allina relied on the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, which includes the Late-Binding™ Enterprise Data Warehouse and a broad suite of analytics applications.
Results:

Intravenous (IV) heparin is widely used to prevent thrombosis in a variety of clinical settings, yet it is considered one of the highest-risk medications used in the inpatient setting because of the potential for dosing errors. Allina Health identified multiple IV heparin protocols among its hospitals, a variation that increased the risk of errors. Standard practices that addressed patients’ clinical needs in a disease-specific way were lacking. Over the course of 1.5 years, more than 9,000 patients at Allina Health had an IV heparin protocol ordered, so IV heparin safety was of utmost concern.
To address this quality issue and improve clinical value, Allina Health created a systemwide interdisciplinary team to standardize IV heparin therapeutic guidelines and monitor the impact of the standard guideline on patient outcomes. Allina Health engaged multiple physician stakeholder groups to review proposed protocols and provide critical feedback to help ensure the best possible patient care and safety. To effectively monitor IV heparin outcomes, patient safety, and the impact of the new, standard guidelines and protocols, Allina Health developed an anticoagulation safety analytics application, using the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications. These outcomes improvement efforts resulted in:

A seven percent relative improvement in the percentage of patients therapeutic within 24 hours of protocol initiation.
Paring 20+ site-based documents (e.g., policies, protocols, and order sets) to one systemwide guideline and four systemwide protocols.

Mixed reviews of the effectiveness of pay-for-performance programs leave hospitals wondering how to affect meaningful change in patient care and outcomes. However, MultiCare’s experience with focused improvement efforts supported by analytics for pneumonia, sepsis, and women’s care showed that better data consistently leads to better patient outcomes.
Committed to improving population health, and informed by their experience as well as national trends and outcomes, MultiCare formed a new partnership with Health Catalyst, a next-generation data, analytics, and decision support company. The shared risk partnership generated an improvement framework and governance structure formed around a Shared Governance Committee which is responsible for prioritizing, resourcing, and aligning improvement initiatives across MultiCare. The committee and the projects it ultimately approves are informed by data-driven opportunity analysis and ongoing analytics support. This partnership and structure have achieved the following:
Results

Strategic alignment of outcomes goals across the organization.
Established an Analytics Center of Excellence.
Integrated financial data into outcomes improvement initiatives.

Effective data integration enables high value through more strategic, data-driven decision-making, while faster data acquisition feeds and speeds up the process. Orlando Health, one of Florida’s most comprehensive private, not-for-profit healthcare networks, recognized the need for effective data integration to successfully manage to the organization’s changing business needs. The health system needed the ability to rapidly acquire and link disparate healthcare data sources in various ways in order to answer clinical and business questions.
Leaders at Orlando Health needed a data warehouse that better met their needs. They determined that switching from an early binding data process to a late-binding process would provide greater flexibility and expand their access to critical data, with shorter data acquisition times.
With the new EDW, Orlando Health achieved the following efficiencies:

245 fewer days and 1.0 less full time employee (FTE) needed to integrate encounter billing summary system data.
56 fewer days and 0.4 less FTE needed to integrate Infection control system data.
99 percent reduction (90 days saved) in the amount of time needed to implement system enhancements.
98 percent reduction in the work hours needed to incorporate system enhancements.

Assuring patient satisfaction can be challenging, particularly when providing care to pregnant women with high-risk pregnancy conditions. As one of the foremost perinatal practices in the country, Minnesota Perinatal Physicians (MPP) acted swiftly to end a significant delay in scheduling ultrasound appointments, and reduced wait times for other visits.
With an aim to improve patient care and experience, the maternal fetal medicine (MFM) specialists at MPP, employees of Allina Health, leveraged Allina’s “Improving Clinical Value” Program—an initiative that has elevated the patient care experience for numerous other patient populations while simultaneously lowering the per capita cost of care for each one.
Results:

$210,000 in increased revenue because of improved access, projected to be $280,000 within 12 months.
20.8 percent relative improvement in no-show rate.
20 percent increase in available ultrasound appointments and an 18.2 percent increase in utilization.

Nationally, approximately 700,000 hospitalizations occur each year with the principle diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), with one in five patients being readmitted within 30 days. Even with a national cost for each COPD readmission costing between $9,000 and $12,000, evidence-based measures that improve patient outcomes and decrease COPD readmissions are largely lacking.
When reviewing organizational performance for 30-day all cause readmission, MultiCare Health System identified COPD as one of the top two readmission diagnoses, along with a rate higher than expected. This prompted the organization to take action. MultiCare implemented a NOREADMITS bundle, using the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform and integrating performance measures for each element of the bundle, resulting in:

16.5 percent reduction in readmission rate.

Approximately 34 fewer patients with COPD readmitted each year, saving an estimated $360,000 annually based on national benchmarks.

95 percent of COPD patients were assessed for readmission risk.
Two-fold increase in COPD order set utilization.

Allina Health, an integrated delivery system throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin, has long understood the value of clinical documentation improvement (CDI), and its growing importance in recent years. With the implementation of ICD-10, the specificity needed for accurate coding has increased, and reimbursement shifts have occurred as well, creating sizeable payment disparity for some clinical conditions. Leaders at Allina wanted to understand where their CDI program would have the greatest return on investment. However, data from the EHR was not sufficient to inform their strategy. CDI specialists still lacked the ability to perform a comprehensive assessment of the accuracy of clinical documentation, and were unable to confidently target improvement efforts in areas that would generate the greatest return on investment. To take a more data-driven approach, team members leveraged the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, including their Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications to develop a CDI analytics application. With the application, the team identified opportunities and thoroughly vetted them, before collaborating with physicians and service line leaders to educate providers on documentation improvements.
They achieved the following results:

Up to 50 percent of all hospital deaths in the United States are linked to sepsis. That sepsis mortality statistic was not lost on Piedmont Healthcare, a system of six hospitals and more than 100 physician and specialist offices across greater Atlanta and North Georgia. Sepsis accounted for half of Piedmont’s mortality rate, despite years of progress in sepsis care.
Piedmont leaders recognized that they needed an innovative quality improvement methodology to spread best practices and sustain improvement, supported by an accessible source of timely, reliable, and actionable information. They therefore implemented a “core and spread” team structure to promote enterprise-wide adoption of best practices. The health system also deployed a sepsis prevention analytics application to deliver performance insight to all levels of the organization, and discovered a high correlation between better patient and financial outcomes and the number of bundle elements the patient received. Being able to tie outcomes to interventions, along with the incorporation of nurse driven protocols, resulted in sustained practice change and greater engagement from physicians, nursing and frontline staff, all the way to the Board level.
As a result, Piedmont achieved the following impressive outcomes:

5.8 percent reduction in mortality for all patients with severe sepsis and septic shock, translating to 26 lives saved in one year.
2.5 percent reduction in total inpatient length of stay (LOS).
8.2 percent reduction in variable cost per case, equating to $4.3 million saved in one year.

A stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) is both costly and risky. In a sobering example of the latter, nearly one third of patients admitted to the ICU experience delirium, a state of cognitive impairment that can increase risk of death in the hospital. Still, many cardiovascular patients need intensive care that can only be provided safely in an intensive care unit, requiring hospitals to assure enough beds and skilled ICU staff for these patients—while quickly identifying which patients can receive care as good or better in another unit.
Allina Health has achieved this dual objective with a concerted ICU avoidance strategy for specific complex sub-populations of cardiovascular (CV) patients. The foundation of this strategy is risk-informed decisions about which patients can avoid the ICU; clinical staff education; and an analytics platform and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from Health Catalyst that enables CV care leaders to monitor safety metrics for those patients who avoid a stay in the ICU. So far, Allina Health’s efforts have resulted in the following achievements:

Post Operative Atrial Fibrillation occurs in up to 30 percent of all patients after cardiac surgery. This serious complication increases the length of the patient’s hospital stay, and is associated with a twofold increase in the incidence of cerebral infarction and an increased risk of 30-day mortality. Timely and consistent management of Post Op Afib can prevent significant complications and help prevent death. To standardize such an approach to managing Post Op Afib, Allina Health’s Minneapolis Heart Institute created a physician committee to raise consensus on and develop a protocol for Post Op Afib management.
The committee ultimately created a nurse-driven protocol and decision support algorithm linked to the health system’s electronic health record (EHR). Additionally, it uses analytics, supported by Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding™ Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), to track physician ordering rate, patient outcomes, and cost. This combination of people, processes, and analytics tools has made a significant difference for Allina and its patients.

Percutaneous Cardiac Intervention (PCI) is a minimally-invasive alternative to open heart surgery—a procedure that approximately 600,000 U.S. patients will undergo this year.
Allina Health, a non-profit health system with 90+ clinics and 13 hospitals with locations throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin, is a leading provider of the procedure in Minnesota. Allina Health discovered that major bleeding events following PCI procedures (the most common non cardiac complication of PCI), though not affecting mortality, were increasing length of stay (LOS) and cost.
To improve the quality of its PCI procedures and decrease costs, Allina Health recognized the need to accurately assess bleeding risk and then implemented best-practice interventions to prevent major bleeding events.
Already, physicians and patients have seen that these new interventions, which includes a bleeding risk assessment tool, allows clinicians to focus interventions based on risk and reduce complications. The top results from Allina Health’s interventions include:

Health spending in the United States is greater than the gross domestic product of most nations, and the costs for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke care alone total $193.1 billion. CVD accounts for approximately one out of every three deaths in the U.S. and contributes to the shorter life expectancy of Americans. Thirty-five percent of CVD related deaths occur before the age of 75 years, and 19 percent before the age of 65.
Allina Health is a large integrated healthcare delivery network operating in Minnesota and western Wisconsin that includes three large cardiac centers. Due to the prevalence and mortality rate of CVD, leaders at Allina Health recognized that they needed to focus on cardiovascular health in order to truly impact the population health and patient outcomes of the communities they serve.
By leveraging real-time data from its enterprise data warehouse (EDW), Allina Health effectively identified and addressed clinical practice variation and operational issues affecting cardiovascular care and costs. In doing so, the health system realized more than $75 million in performance enhancement savings and revenue increase over a four-year period by focusing on supply chain, lab test and blood utilization, clinical practice changes and clinical documentation improvement.

By the age of 60, more than one-third of women in the United States have had a hysterectomy. Healthcare systems across the country are recognizing that a women’s health service line offers a pathway to improving care and decreasing cost for these patients. Having accurate activity-based costing information is necessary to uncover opportunities for clinical practice improvement and cost reduction.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the decision to organize Women’s Health as a service line across the entire health system. UPMC fortified this approach with strong and collaborative leadership, an enterprise data warehouse, and an activity-based cost management system. The results:

20 percent reduction in inpatient length of stay for hysterectomies (over a three-year time period)
34 percent reduction in open hysterectomies
28.3 percent reduction in 30-day readmissions for hysterectomies

These results were obtained during a time when this clinical service saw a 25 percent improvement in its contribution margin.

Between 2007 and 2014, U.S. healthcare costs per capita increased by almost 25 percent. The way in which health systems are typically organized, managed, and budgeted (as departments and units within separate hospitals) works against them when they attempt to improve population health and decrease costs. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a large health system with more than 20 hospitals and 500 clinics, was keenly aware of this challenge as it embarked on population health and value-based care initiatives that spanned the entire organization.
The health system determined that it needed to break down the virtual walls between care centers and standardize service lines across the enterprise. By extension, this organizational change mandated the need for activity-based costing in healthcare that would deliver the insight necessary to run a service line effectively. UPMC organized six service lines within the health system, each spearheaded by clinical, operational, and financial leadership. Each service line uses the health system’s innovative, data-driven activity-based costing methodology to understand the true cost of care.
Notable, measurable results of UPMC’s service lines and activity-based costing methodology to date include:

$42 million of cost reduction opportunities (approximately 2 percent of targeted service line cost)
$5 million in supplies savings
Transparency toward identification of contribution margin variation for specific procedures
Up to 97 percent improvement in time to access information

Heart attacks are the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States, yet heart attacks are largely preventable through healthier lifestyles. Spurred on by this knowledge, New Ulm Medical Center, the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, and the rural community of New Ulm, Minnesota, teamed up to create Hearts Beat Back: The Heart of New Ulm (HONU) Project. This population-based prevention demonstration project aims to reduce the number of heart attacks and heart disease risk factors among the New Ulm population.
Recognizing the complex web of personal, institutional, and societal factors that influence an individual’s heart-health behaviors, HONU leaders implemented a multilevel strategy spanning 10 years to improve the health of the entire population.
The HONU Project’s multilevel, data-driven approach has resulted in substantial changes in improving population health in New Ulm:

Significant improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol at the population level.

86 percent of residents now have blood pressure within the recommended range.
72 percent have LDL cholesterol within the recommended range.

Improvements are greater than changes seen in the national comparison population.

As consumers pay more for their healthcare they are demanding more transparency. In a telling example, it’s estimated that over 84 percent of patients use online provider reviews to help make care decisions. With increased transparency, hospitals need to develop strategies to address patient satisfaction while finding a way to participate for more fully in the patient satisfaction dialogue and social media communications, including the rating process.
One large hospital has done just that by increasing transparency in the patient review process. A key component is providing physician star ratings by patients on the hospital’s own website, with patient survey data sourced from Health Catalyst’s analytics platform. While this strategy took time and effort to win over physician acceptance, it has paid off considerably by taking patient satisfaction to new heights.
The overall patient satisfaction improvement initiative, of which the physician transparency effort was a key component, has proven to be resoundingly successful in supporting physicians and staff in the difficult work of providing outstanding and compassionate care – and has reaped impressive results including,